Alkaiser's Full Review: Valkerie Profile for PlayStation 1
Man, I had heard a ton about this game. A bunch of people out there were claiming that THIS was going to be the new hit RPG. "It's a REAL RPG (2D)!" Some of the hype I'd heard about this game were from people who worked at other game companies, so I figured this had to pretty good, right?
Well, half right.
First off, 2D or 3D does not determine how "real" an RPG is. It's more about fun factor to me than it is about being an old school throwback. Real RPGs are just good.
Valkyrie Profile isn't good. It's just OK. It takes several good concepts, and mixes them together to become an average game. It's like what happens when you get a bunch of different watercolors and you mix them all together...you always end up with brown.
Or better yet, it's like getting a bunch of really good cuts of meat: sirloin, filet mignon, london broil, and then turning them all into ground beef to make a hamburger. If Enix would have taken out some of the things that they did halfway, then this game would rock. It'd be up there with Suikoden II, instead it ends up not holding its own against Chrono Cross.
The storyline is kind of ambitious. You are the Warrior Goddess Valkyrie of Norse lore. There is apparently a war brewing amongst the Norse gods, and you have to send them deceased human warriors who are prepped to fight in the afterlife. (known as "Einherjar".) You use your powers as the "chooser of souls" to attune yourself to people who are about to die, and roam around on this map that I'm not sure corresponds to any geographical location on Earth, listening in on and intervening in people's lives who might be good to send to fight.
My complaints about the game start from the very beginning. Bear in mind that as I started this game up, I had become very excited about playing it, because all my old games were starting to disinterest me.
This is what immediately caught my eye in the introductory sequence.
The voices in the game suck...totally. When characters are having conversations with each other through voiceovers it doesn't like they're talking to each other, rather, it sounds like the programmers are pushing buttons and playing sound clips of all the characters with random wait intervals.
On top of that, what the heck's up with Valkyrie standing in that field of flowers...she has one line, "How nostalgic." It's like that really bad movie of Moby Dick they did where the main character goes running through the docks, and all of sudden pauses, sets his foot up on a crate, and says "Call me, ISHMAEL!" and then runs off. Thanks. That was very interesting...but stupid.
Then you see the castle, and the really bad parallax shifting that's done throughout the entire game. (The parallax is the way things in the background will scroll at different rates than things that are closer in the foreground.) Instead of having a smooth scrolling background, the deepest background level is set to move like 1 pixel every time the forground moves 10 pixels. If this was done quickly, you might not notice, but it moves really, slow, so it ends up looking something like a clock ticking. Tick, move background 1 pixel lower, tick...etc. It looks RETARDED and it's done everywhere in the game.
The other thing you'll notice is that everyone looks like a doll. (Jelanda, in particular, looks like a type of doll...) If you're going to be 2D...stay 2D, and don't make 3D CG portraits of your people...it's too much of a contrast to the rest of the game.
Anyway, after an introduction like that to set the tone for the rest of the game, I hoped it would get better, which it did, but not by much.
The annoying random voice-overs are still present when you switch storytellers from Valkyrie to your side characters. This is interesting, but really a bad idea. It'd be much better to have Valkyrie watching over the story as a third party. I like having the background on the character, but they're excessively drawn out, and I can't hit the button to go through them any faster because they have the abysmal voice overs in them.
On top of that there are a lot of things brought up in those sequences that are just ignored. For example, one of the characters asks why Valkyrie and the Norse gods need to recruit humans to fight, if they're so powerful, and Valkyrie just ignores her. Ok, so what's the point in having the characters speak then!? It's like there's nothing really going on with those side story arcs, they're just bad attempts to make you care about the other characters for a little while before the "sledgehammer of plot" comes along and bashes you through to the next part of the game.
Then there's the bad Castlevania part of the game. You run around in 2D mode with all of its bad parallaxing glory, and you have 3 basic abilities, freeze crystal, swing sword, and jump. You can freeze monsters in place, but not hurt them. If you touch them with your sword it ostensibly does nothing to them. You may attack first in battle or something, but it's pointless. Why give you the ability to swing your sword if you can't do ANYTYHING with it?! You're supposed to cut down background objects, but I'm halfway through the game, and I've done it twice...once in the tutorial, and I cut down a tree once. That's it. I appreciate being able to jump & duck and stuff, but don't try and add things to the game if you're just going to do nothing with them. You don't even end up freezing things that much either.
Then comes combat. This "innovative, unique combo-based" system that the Enix guys keep raving about is about as innovative as Puff Daddy "innovating" someone else's song. Didn't anyone else play Tales of Destiny? It's the SAME SYSTEM! The only difference I can tell, is you get some finishing moves every once in a while in Valkyrie Profile, and those get VERY tired after you've seen them for the 100th time. (I'm not exaggerating.) The timing part is interesting, but there are no innovations on attacks, all the swords look the same (which you'd think they'd change since it's in 2D.), and there's nothing to really unlock by levelling up your characters. Every once in a while, you get something new, like a charge attack which looks just like the normal attack, but you can use it in different circumstances. Combat gets really tedious after a while.
In addition, I encountered something else I wasn't expecting in a 2D game...slowdown. Slowdown in combat, on the side-scrolling screens when you open chests...this is rediculous. I know whenever a trap's coming because my game loads for 2 seconds or so.
The best thing about the game is the points you allocate to give your characters abilities like you'd get in a pen and paper RPG. You can alter their personality characteristics to make them better people and increase their attributes with other skills.
When your characters have progressed enough, you sned them off to Asgard to fight. This is my favorite part of the game. You send your characters off and after a certain amount of periods have passed (8 chapters in the game, 24 periods in a chapter. Visiting places on the map will take up a certain amount of periods before the phase is complete.) you'll get a report on the big war. If you've sent up any characters you'll get a report of their exploits. That's pretty much what I'm playing the game for now. The one cool innovation of the whole game.
What possibly irks me the most about this game is that the guys at Enix seem to actually bought their own hype. I was reading through the manual and it's full of grossly blown-out-of-proportion claims. For instance, there are a reported 6 Different Game Modes in the manual. Here are the 6 different modes:
New Game
Continue Game
Prelude
Config
View Introduction
I forget the last ultra fun game "mode", but you get the idea, menu items aren't modes. But, go look on their website in their forum, and it's basically them thumping their chest a whole bunch. One of the people on the forum posting notice that it seemed like there were a bunch of Enix eployees there who sounded like robots. That's almost grounds right there for me to lower this game to a 2, but I'll leave it at 3 because I'm feeling generous today. If you're on the fence, it's definitely at least a rent, but this game is the most expensive game I've purchased recently ($45 on ebworld.com) and you might not want to throw out that much cash for an average title.
According to the website, "Valkyrie Profile is an RPG that draws on elements of side-scrolling action games to produce a game with a flavor all its own." And so it does. Castlevania: SOTN was London Broil, The Final Fantasy Series is Filet Mignon, and Tales of Destiny & Suikoden II are Sirloin...
Valkyrie Profile is a hamburger...a flavor all its own.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.